Author: jetbrane

When the US military took action in Iraq there were different ways of reporting it depending on where you were sitting. If you supported the US action you saw the Iraqi people in bondage to Saddam Hussein and so spoke about the action of the US military as one of liberating Iraq. No doubt there were others who spoke about that same action of the US military as one invading Iraq. The way the nomenclature is crafted reveals ones position on the action.

Something similar happens in discussions on regeneration. The Reformed will look at what God does in regeneration and they see a will in bondage and the action of God as liberating the will. Others see the Reformed doctrine of the Father speaking the Son as an illocutionary act with the Spirit accomplishing perlocutionary comprehension in the listener as an invasion.

How one sees regeneration, whether as invasion where God violently coerces the person or whether as liberation where God releases the person from brutally coercive and oppressive forces will depend on their worldview. Those who see regeneration as God’s violent act are those who see God’s regenerating work just as Muslims sympathetic to Saddam Hussein saw US military operations in Iraq. Those who see regeneration as God’s liberating work are those who see God’s work just as Frenchman saw the Allies arrival in 1944 in Paris.

Now we drop into the equation that those whose wills are in bondage and so are being brutally coerced are people who love their bondage, and insist that bondage is freedom. The effectiveness of their enslaved wills is seen in how they love their chains. Arminians then insist that these people who love their bondage and call slavery freedom should renounce, quite apart from God’s regenerative illocutionary Word and perlocutionary act, their spiritual captivity, and further Arminians agrees with those in captivity that God’s locutionary liberating speech act is an invasion. So on one hand Arminians agree that people in bondage need to be liberated but on the other hand they squeal when Reformed people insist that the Spirit of Christ is the sui generis liberator.

Next the question arises as to how it is that people in bondage are held responsible for the slavery that they can’t help but want. The answer to this question is that they are held responsible because they freely will out of their bonded will to call their bondage freedom all the while retaining the natural faculties to choose to the contrary even if they don’t retain the moral faculties to choose to the contrary. The fall and their shared identity in Adam hasn’t delimited any of their natural capacity or physical ability to choose God. This is why they are held culpable for their God hating leanings. We must understand that because the natural power remains intact in those who bear the image of God that they are rightly held responsible for using that natural power in defiance against their better knowledge.

However natural ability still has to reckon with moral inability. Though the natural and physical functions remain whole they are only as good as the moral dispositions that govern them. Those moral dispositions are given over to an agenda that seeks to dethrone God in favor of the self, all the while insisting that God has done them wrong by denying them full throated autonomy. In this state and condition man will use his natural faculties to attack God’s Godness at every turn and hence he is responsible. He can only recognize this bondage and be rescued from it by being liberated. Indeed, the first glimmerings of being liberated is recognizing the bondage for what it is. Before God can be seen to be anything but a repulsive and cruel enemy the human will must be set free, the heart of stone must be vivified to flesh, and the person must be brought out of their wastrel wanderings to the safety of covenant and the peace of home.

“If we enjoy union with Christ, not only we ourselves but even our works too are just in God’s sight. This doctrine of of the justification or works (which was developed in the Reformed Church) is of the greatest consequence for ethics. It makes clear that the man who belongs to Christ need not be the prey of continual remorse. On the contrary he can go about his daily work confidently and joyfully.”

Wilhelm Niesel
Reformed Symbolics: A Comparison of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Protestantism

The Reformed faith deals with the problem of remaining sin in all that we do by teaching this truth that not only our persons but also our works are justified. When this teaching is combined with the ongoing necessity to be conformed to the image of Christ in our daily walk both the dangers of despair over one’s lack of conformity to Christ and the danger of an attitude that concludes that since sin is inevitable in our works why bother contending for righteousness are eclipsed.

There are other ways to deal with the reality of the sin that remains in all that we do after being declared right with God. The Keswick’s contend that sin can be so suppressed that one can have victory over sin and so not sin anymore. The holiness folk contend that sin can not only be suppressed but that it can be eradicated by a second work of grace called entire sanctification or perfect love. My examination of and my experience in these movements though has lead me to believe that what happens in such a move is a defining of sin downward so that people can convince themselves that they really are done with sin.

This is a case where different theology makes a radical difference in personality. The Keswick and Holiness view when seriously embraced by people leads to a incredible self-righteousness. Obviously, if someone has been delivered from sinning there is a incredible temptation to look down on other people who haven’t yet been delivered. Also people who embrace this view end up as people who take sin lightly. Just try convincing someone that they may have a sin problem who is convinced that they have reached a point where they no longer sin.

In the Reformed faith we both hate and yet at the same time recognize that we continue to sin and yet we are neither in despair about that nor are we casual about it since we believe both that all of our works are justified and that out of gratitude for all the Christ has done for us we must continue to seek to ever increasingly be conformed to the character of our Lord Jesus.

Hence being Reformed keeps us from being twisted in our personality by either living in constant despair about the always present sin in our obedience or by living in a wicked presumptuousness that since the lack in our obedience is always forgiven therefore we have no need to be concerned about the lack in our obedience, or by redefining sin as the Keswick and Holiness people do thus creating personalities inflated with self-righteousness.

Being Reformed — it makes for stable personalities and quality character.

______________________________________________________________

p.s. — An autobiographical word.

I grew up in the holiness movement and was taught entire sanctification. I earnestly sought it but never achieved it — praise God. It is one reason why I left the movement. I just couldn’t convince myself, that I had reached moral perfection. Many of my classmates did make sudden discoveries of their moral perfection in their senior year in college as they could not accept a call to the ministry unless they had been entirely sanctified.

From undergraduate school I went and did my seminary work at a Keswick school. In both my time in the Holiness movement and my time among the Keswicks you could cut with a knife the self-righteousness.

In classes both in undergraduate and in Seminary, in institutions separated by 800 miles, I heard Professors say at the front of classes that I took that “they hadn’t sinned in 30 years.”